8,529 research outputs found
Relative Entailment Among Probabilistic Implications
We study a natural variant of the implicational fragment of propositional
logic. Its formulas are pairs of conjunctions of positive literals, related
together by an implicational-like connective; the semantics of this sort of
implication is defined in terms of a threshold on a conditional probability of
the consequent, given the antecedent: we are dealing with what the data
analysis community calls confidence of partial implications or association
rules. Existing studies of redundancy among these partial implications have
characterized so far only entailment from one premise and entailment from two
premises, both in the stand-alone case and in the case of presence of
additional classical implications (this is what we call "relative entailment").
By exploiting a previously noted alternative view of the entailment in terms of
linear programming duality, we characterize exactly the cases of entailment
from arbitrary numbers of premises, again both in the stand-alone case and in
the case of presence of additional classical implications. As a result, we
obtain decision algorithms of better complexity; additionally, for each
potential case of entailment, we identify a critical confidence threshold and
show that it is, actually, intrinsic to each set of premises and antecedent of
the conclusion
An Entailment Relation for Reasoning on the Web
Reasoning on the Web is receiving an increasing attention because of emerging fields such as Web adaption and Semantic Web. Indeed, the advanced functionalities striven for in these fields call for reasoning capabilities. Reasoning on the Web, however, is usually done using existing techniques rarely fitting the Web. As a consequence, additional data processing like data conversion from Web formats (e.g. XML or HTML) into some other formats (e.g. classical logic terms and formulas) is often needed and aspects of the Web (e.g. its inherent inconsistency) are neglected. This article first gives requirements for an entailment tuned to reasoning on the Web. Then, it describes how classical logic’s entailment can be modified so as to enforce these requirements. Finally, it discusses how the proposed entailment can be used in applying logic programming to reasoning on the Web
A Context-theoretic Framework for Compositionality in Distributional Semantics
Techniques in which words are represented as vectors have proved useful in
many applications in computational linguistics, however there is currently no
general semantic formalism for representing meaning in terms of vectors. We
present a framework for natural language semantics in which words, phrases and
sentences are all represented as vectors, based on a theoretical analysis which
assumes that meaning is determined by context.
In the theoretical analysis, we define a corpus model as a mathematical
abstraction of a text corpus. The meaning of a string of words is assumed to be
a vector representing the contexts in which it occurs in the corpus model.
Based on this assumption, we can show that the vector representations of words
can be considered as elements of an algebra over a field. We note that in
applications of vector spaces to representing meanings of words there is an
underlying lattice structure; we interpret the partial ordering of the lattice
as describing entailment between meanings. We also define the context-theoretic
probability of a string, and, based on this and the lattice structure, a degree
of entailment between strings.
We relate the framework to existing methods of composing vector-based
representations of meaning, and show that our approach generalises many of
these, including vector addition, component-wise multiplication, and the tensor
product.Comment: Submitted to Computational Linguistics on 20th January 2010 for
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